December 18, 2013

On page 822 of its December issue, the Academy of Management Journal announced its retraction of a 2009 article by Ulrich Lichtenthaler:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief of Academy of Management Journal.

Formal investigations by the Academy of Management Journal and an affiliated university of Professor Ulrich Lichtenthaler have revealed ethical violations in research practices. Those violations center on the larger data collection effort that forms the foundation for this article as well as the empirics and reporting in the article itself. Independent re-analysis has been unable to replicate the findings as reported in this article and other journals have retracted other published pieces from the larger data collection effort.

This retraction marks 13 retracted articles by Lichtenthaler.

The "affiliated university” is not specified, but would presumably be WHU (his PhD institution) — which announced its own sanctions last summer — as opposed to Mannheim (his current employer) which seems to have said nothing.

With the AMJ retraction, there are five journals who have not yet retracted their suspect papers. Since AMJ retracted its suspected papers while the others have not, this suggests that AMJ has either a more rigorous vetting process or higher standards than the other journals.

I received four notifications this morning: two personal emails, a Google news watch and a Facebook posting — all referring to this morning’s Retraction Watch article by Ivan Oransky. Oransky said the AMJ article has 97 citations in Web of Knowledge, which would make it one of his most cited articles.

Fortunately, the article was on my suspect list. This means it is not cited in our new edited book, nor in our open innovation special issue.

Bibliography

The full list of Lichtenthaler (or Holger Ernst) retracted papers (not including the three withdrawn papers):

Lichtenthaler, Ulrich (2008). “Externally commercializing technology assets: An examination of different process stages,” Journal of Business Venturing, 23 (4): 445-464. doi: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2007.06.002 (Retracted by the editor and author, November 2012)

Holger Ernst, James G. Conley, Nils Omland (2012). “How to create commercial value from patents: The role of patent management,” Research Policy, published online 21 May 2012. doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2012.04.012 (Retracted by the authors and editor prior to print publication, February 2013)